Network Quality is Vital to the User Experience. The commonly accepted measure of networks is megabits per second, which is why increasing bandwidth is seen as the solution to performance problems. So, if bandwidth increases year on year, why is user experience still the number one problem?
Packets must arrive on-time and in order to deliver a good user experience. Why?
So, what does this mean for network measurement...?
Monitoring solutions are commonly used to assess a network, yet it is crucial to know they can't measure Quality. What's the difference? Monitoring is observing traffic on a road to assess utilization. Quality is knowing the car passing by will make it to its destination in time.
Quality issues dramatically affect the usability of a packet and the time of a packet. For example, if a data packet arrives out of order because a packet has been lost then it cannot be processed until the missing packet has been recovered. Recovery time can be extensive, which is detrimental to the user experience.
The good news is MyConnection Server (MCS) Quality testing will identify and report all the problems that threaten the user experience, in addition to performance metrics.
The MCS Quality Assessment Point (QAP) appliances can be deployed anywhere in an enterprise network to establish a testing point for Quality and Performance measurement.
Monitoring solutions are commonly used to assess a network, yet it is crucial to know they can't measure Quality. What's the difference? Monitoring is observing traffic on a road to assess utilization. Quality is knowing the car passing by will make it to its destination in time.
Quality issues dramatically affect the usability of a packet and the time of a packet. For example, if a data packet arrives out of order because a packet has been lost then it cannot be processed until the missing packet has been recovered. Recovery time can be extensive, which is detrimental to the user experience.
The good news is MyConnection Server (MCS) Quality testing will identify and report all the problems that threaten the user experience, in addition to performance metrics.
The MCS Quality Assessment Point (QAP) appliances can be deployed anywhere in an enterprise network to establish a testing point for Quality and Performance measurement.
Every data (TCP) packet that goes out onto the network is given a fixed amount of time to reach its destination.
If that packet fails to reach its destination another packet will be sent out onto the network, which is called a retransmit event.
When a retransmit event occurs the sender of the packets assumes it's the cause of the problem so it dramatically reduces the flow of packets, even though it may not be the problem.
The problem doesn't end here. If the reason for the retransmit event was packet loss then all the packets after the loss can't be processed.